Category Archives: Democratic Heroes

In the six months since I’ve returned from Jerusalem I’ve managed to get over half way from Genesis to the last of the minor prophets – Malachi. (Those are generally all the books in both the Protestant’s Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible) Last night after the end of the Democrat’s Presidential nominating convention I read Psalm 10: As with Job before it I couldn’t help relate many of the lines to current events, to wit:

Vs. 2: In arrogance the wicked persecute the poor- (Donald Trump ripping off legions of small contractors, college students, renters, investors)

Vs. 3: For the wicked boast of the desires of their heart, those greedy for gain….:(Ditto Trump)

Vs. 5: Their ways prosper at all times: your judgments are on high, out of their sight, as for their foes, they scoff (tweet) at them.

Vs. 7: …..under their tongues are mischief and iniquity.

Vs. 8: …Their eyes stealthily watch for the helpless:

The Republican evangelicals really have nominated a fifth grader’s, middle finger of a candidate. I’d say fourth grade as that is one estimate of Donald Trump’s vocabulary usage but my older grandson is going into fourth grade and I just can’t stand the idea of my grandson being in the same class with Donald Trump.

Even my first grade grandson has a superior vocabulary to the Trumpster. Yesterday after our trip to the Duluth Aquarium we were talking about Octopus ink and he said it was an “obstacle illusion.” That’s also a good description of the Big Apple, rip off artist. The fifth grader in me can’t help but think of that stock fifth grade retort, “I know you are but what am I?”, when I hear him call Clinton “Crooked Hillary.”

It turns out that about two-thirds of Americans who call themselves “evangelicals” never or rarely go to church. Consequently, they have nominated a candidate who is disinterested in religion and contemptuous of today’s thin Republican dogma. Now they are faced with a candidate, like her or not, who was locked out of her house by her Mother to face down the neighborhood’s bullies. Too bad the Republicans didn’t have any candidates with Mother’s like Hillary Clinton had.

I did however, have the chance to vent a little as I did on Apr 21st. 2002, in a column for Not Eudora which began:

I am a mass murderer. Now mind you, I’m not talking about just any old, garden variety, mass murder but the world’s most massive holocaust ever. My crime is so vast that it dwarfs the nazi death camps, the Soviet purges, and the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge all rolled into one.

Four years and two more Republican candidacies (2002 and 2004) later I finally started attending Democratic Precinct Caucuses. I may go back to the Republicans to attempt a rescue of Abraham Lincoln but my favorite precinct caucus of all time will forever be the DFL caucuses of 2008 in which swarms of like-minded Obama supporters flooded the Democratic caucuses to give Obama the lead in Duluth.

Obama reminds me of my favorite Kansas politician Dwight David Eisenhower. Of course, both men had Mothers from Kansas. So did I.

The HuffPo’s Ryan Grim and Sabrina Siddiqui obtained a PowerPoint presentation given to incoming Democratic freshmen legislators by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the DCCC’s recommended schedule for House members includes four hours spent on the phone begging rich people for money and one hour spent begging rich person for money in person. This is the daily schedule. As Kevin Drum notes, this leaves no time for studying or homework. …

This, as much as anything else, is why our Congress is both dysfunctional, legislators have no clue what they’re voting for or against most of the time, and so attentive to the priorities of the very wealthy.

Oh yeah. Now I remember. Roger supported the Red Plan too when he could have guaranteed a referendum on the monstrosity and saved our elementary children from classes with 36 children.

And I forgot. I’m caucusing with the DFL now. I shouldn’t criticize my buddies in the party.

And here’s how he can get “Duluth’s share” of the 1 billion to the Vikings. Tap the Red Plan. The School Board has already given 1 million of it for a hockey rink. (Not the Congdon Rink but the one out at the old Clyde Iron plant)

Fifty kids to a classroom would be a small price to pay to put all those Twin City’s builders to work up here when they outbid the locals for the jobs just like they did on the Red Plan.

I don’t recall why I hurried to upload that last post five or six hours ago. I think I was afraid that if I delayed it might somehow be lost. Well, I’ve just gone through it and made a number of important edits.

Tomorrow you can go to your precinct caucus. If you are a Democrat I’d suggest you keep your mind open. The alternative is to act like a Republican and I trust you’ve gotten an eye full of their candidates. Take your time. Someone really interesting might show him or herself.

Someday the Dish will decline and I will no longer feel compelled to check it out on a near daily basis. It will joke around one too many times about “bears” or the Internet definition of some unfortunate, self righteous, ex Senator’s name and I will turn elsewhere. But with gems like this today that gave me a hearty belly laugh I’ll keep turning in to keep my brain fresh and informed:

The woman handed the dirty-faced infant to Old Hickory. Jackson took it and held it up before him. “Ah! There is a fine specimen of American childhood. I think, madam, your boy will make a fine man some day.” Then, with a quick gesture, he put the dirty face of the infant close to the face of Secretary [of War] Eaton, saying quickly and soberly, “Eaton, kiss him?” General Eaton pretended to do so with a wry face, amid the laughter of the crowd, and Jackson then handed the baby back to the happy mother.

My Buddy and I have had a great many words over my continual abuse of the GOP. My Buddy is not affiliated with either party. He has regularly chided me for my one-sided criticism of Republicans and noted the there are plenty of Democratic hacks and doofi (that’s the plural).

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When Democrats get rid of Governor Walker, the Republican Congress, Obama wins relection and Goldman Sachs goes back to giving the Democrats the big bucks this little worm will turn. Until then I caucus with the Democrats and act like the same kind of maverick I was all the years I was a Republican.

PS. I had a close call. A friend at church asked if anyone had spilled the beans about my threat (fantasy) to run for Congress to Claudia. My friend kept her mouth closed. Claudia is still blissfully unaware of my threat.

When someone does unkindly spill the beans I’ll just claim I’m doing it to sell my book. For you my dear readers……don’t be so sure I’m not lying about that. I am a politician.

I was in 4th grade in 1960 when JFK beat my family’s candidate Richard Nixon. The Democrats back then were as busy letting the dead vote in Chicago as the Republicans today are busy keeping the living from the polls. When school started that year I told my next door neighbor Becky Penney that Nixon would beat her family’s candidate Kennedy. It was the first of my many subsequent bad guesses about election outcomes.

When he was assassinated two years later I knew a horror had been committed because I was steeped in the lore of Abe Lincoln’s murder. However, being just shy of 13 I was too young to get caught up in the thrall of Camelot which some folks a little older than me have never managed to let go of even after 50 years.

I like to see the warts on historical characters so that I don’t get too caught up in their myths. Even so, I was rather sad to read this unsparing assessment of JFK’s widow Jackie and even sadder to find myself agreeing with it. But as my buddy who sent me the link wrote: “…who doesn’t have feet of clay?”

Apropos the last post on Jason Johnson’s angry unhappiness about voting for Obama is this assessment of the advantage Republicans have over Democrats:

“…the Democratic party is perhaps best characterized as a coalition between ideological liberals and moderates in which ideological liberals often have to restrain their impulses. The Republican party, in contrast, is far more conservative-heavy, and far less inclined to allow self-conscious moderates in the party, a small and arguably shrinking minority, to hold sway.”

From the same paragraph is this stark mathematical reality:

“…groups labeled Staunch Conservatives, Main Street Republicans, and Libertarians â€” amount to 29 percent of the general public, 35 percent of registered voters, and a large majority of Republican primary voters. Solid Liberals, in contrast, are 14 percent of the general public and 16 percent of registered voters.”

I almost didn’t read this letter to the Editor from Jason Johnson. I’m glad I did. Jason outlines half a dozen examples of moderate Republican actions by his Democratic President all of which he resents. Here’s about half of his accusations:

“His only liberal accomplishments include a stimulus bill loaded with largely non-stimulative tax cuts to appease the right wing. His health-care plan was taken from a Republican governor. He has been a hawk on Afghanistan. He has embraced warrantless wiretapping, secret prisons and illegal rendition. He has essentially condoned torture with his failure to prosecute war crimes of the Bush administration, even going as far as to block attempts at prosecution by other countries. And he is to the right of Bush on deportations.”

In addition to Jason’s continuing list I could add a couple dozen others including his much maligned Obamacare, which was designed by moderate Republicans like our own former Senator Dave Durenberger and his Administration’s rapid approval, ala ” Drill baby Drill,” of deep water Gulf Oil Wells up until one of Exxon’s wells went haywire.

Obama will need more JJ’s who hold their nose and vote for him. They would like to think that if Obama had taken the liberal cudjal and fought the Republicans their cause would have prevailed. I think they are wrong in that and that Obama and his advisers know this.

For me the biggest frustration is that Obama has been rational so far and his very intellectual honesty and reasonableness are proving less effective than the Republican Party’s crass politicization of a national, even a world crisis. I’d like to think that reason can trump polemics and gratuitous self dealing. (And “No” Buddy. I don’t think for a minute that Democrats as a group are immune from the same faults)

The next post will pretty well point out the dilemma that “Liberals” face.

I hope it wasn’t Obama using target practice verbiage but yes, Buddy. Point taken. If whoever was using such language on the Liberal side was “getting ugly” on Republicans shame on them for flattering them by imitation.

In the United States, because the Republican Party refuses to ever raise taxes and the Democratic Party refused to cut entitlements, the only thing left to cut out of the budget was discretionary spending — especially defense spending.

This post echoes my sentiments about how well Obama is doing by pointing out that on British Petroleum he is more in sync with the public than the Joe Bartons that have accused him of shaking down big business. (Where the hell was Barton and company on the banks?)

As the comment in parentheses suggests Republicans and their pet pundits have largely hopped on the populist bandwagon and accused Obama of shielding the bankers. In my view it is popular but irresponsible not to acknowledge that allowing the damned mega banks to fail would have plunged the world into a Depression not unlike the one we suffered in the 1930’s. Of course, since he didn’t stick it to the banks we’ll never know for sure but I think the state of economic analysis that we’ve attained makes a sufficiently cogent case for Obama’s actions.

By the way I made one comment at the DFL endorsing convention that drew Roger Reinert’s subtle fire. I had said that I much preferred the political parties of my youth that both labored to hold center court to the two parties today that both dote on their extremes. I then added a little too carelessly that I thought Obama had pulled the Democrats back to the center where I preferred them to be.

Roger said that he felt the Democrats had always been a centrist party in the 36 years years he’d been a Democrat.

If I had expounded at length on the issue I would have said that Bill Clinton (who I voted for in 1980 although not in 1984) had brought the Democrats back to the center and that is exactly why he was such a threat to the GOP that when given a half ass excuse (Monica Lewensky) they went ape _ _ _ _ and impeached him.

The Party of Gore, Kerry and now Obama is still firmly in the center of American politics. But Roger is wrong. Thirty six years ago (1974) the Democrats were still under the influence of narrow interest groups that were still on a high from the Age of Aquarius and damned self righteous about it too. If Reagan accomplished nothing else he brought them down from the high.

I’m still confident that Obama will win reelection because the GOP have placed too many land mines in the ground where sensible Republican candidates might want to tread. When they blow up under these poor centrists they have to apologize to Rush Limbaugh for not being sufficiently politically correct. That’s the burden of a dittohead.

I fully agreed with Charles Gessert’s letter in the Trib today about a cartoon a few days back showing Obama encouraging Greasers to cross the border to collect free health care, vote in our elections and undermine the good old US of A.

It was one a a series of crude Obama caricatures that have appeared in the Trib that show no talent for capturing his facial features. Obama has been on the political scene for so long now that there really is no good reason to use a generic black man as his substitute.

In contrast today’s cartoon of Obama with a superman suit hitchhiking to the Gulf was quite funny. It looked like him and got to a truth about him. He’s not a superman or “the one” as his right wing critic’s like to call him. He never claimed to be so even if his high falutin rhetoric raised expectations from his supporters into the stratosphere its our fault not his. Palin supporters are doing the same thing. Drill team baby, drill team!

Certainly by the end of his presidency George W’s appearance suffered greivously at the hand of cartoonists but they tended to shrink him up to runt size suggesting insignificance and stuck his ears out. So far Obama hasn’t suffered that indignity from talented artists.

The one thing that seems to be driving a lot of the anti-Obama hysteria is the suggestion that he’s not pro-American. Its the step child argument of the birther movement which holds he’s not a citizen. According to this blogger right wing Brits are picking up on this only they are claiming he’s anti British. Too bad for them that so many British pensioners depend on dividends from a serial American regulation breaker.

The official source for all the blather of the eccentric Harry Welty – Duluth School Board member, off and on, since 1995. He does his best to live up to Mark Twain's assessment: "First God created the idiot. That was for practice. Then he invented the School Board."